In this episode, Karol talks with James Lindsay, an expert on critical race theory, who discusses his experience in submitting hoax articles to academic journals and the implications of their acceptance. He also delves into the cultural problems facing society and the impact of propaganda on public perception. The Karol Markowicz Show is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network - new episodes debut every Monday & Thursday.
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Hi, and welcome back to the Carol Marcowitz Show on iHeartRadio.
When I book guests for this show, I tell them
it's a mostly non political podcast. I have said that
since the start that I want this to be a
podcast about life. I want to hear who people are
(00:27):
and what they do, what they believe. Sure, but I
never want it to be the news of the day
show where we cover the latest thing that Donald Trump
or Joe Biden said and what my guest thinks about that.
It's not that I have anything against those shows. They're
just exist already, and I didn't want to add to that.
(00:47):
That said, I am a political person in my everyday life.
I'm an open conservative, I'm a public person. I'm a
Twitter addict. I love the election, horse race, all of it.
So it's a challenge sometimes to keep all of that
off of this show. The main thing to me in
making this podcast was there are a million shows about
(01:12):
a million things where the host is liberal. They all
come from a liberal perspective and that doesn't get discussed whatsoever.
It's like being liberal is the default. They have publishing
houses that publish their books. For example, we have conservative
publishing houses. They have news sites. We have conservative news sites.
(01:34):
I didn't like any of that, and I want this
show to challenge that the show is going to come
with conservative assumptions, because again I'm conservative. I think marriage
is good, family is good, career success is good, and
nothing to apologize for all of it. In another time,
these wouldn't even be seen as conservative ideas, but now
(01:57):
they are, and they are what I I'm not going
to hit you over the head with my political angle,
but it's there, just like it is in every single
other show you listen to or watch. I say all
this only because my audience is growing very grateful for that,
and I want to be clear about what I'm trying
(02:18):
to do here. This is a podcast about purposeful living,
how to have a good life, how to meet cultural
challenges when you see them, how to be happier. I
love hearing what my listeners think, so if you have thoughts,
including potential future guests who you want to hear me interview,
let me know. Also, when i hit the one year
(02:40):
mark of this show in October, I'm going to switch
up my three standard questions, So if you have ideas
for what they should be, write to me. If you
have tips, for better living. Send them in let's improve
our lives together. The email is Carol Maarkowitz Show at
gmail dot com or tweet at me on X. Thank
you for listening. Coming up next and interview with James Lindsay.
(03:04):
Join us after the break. Welcome back to the Carol
Markowitz Show on iHeartRadio. My guest today is James Lindsay.
James is a leading expert on critical race theory, the
founder of New Discourse his website, and the author of
approximately ten books, his latest one being Queering of the
(03:24):
American Child. Hi James, Hey, Carol, so nice to have
you on. I have to say that I was trying
to remember when I first heard of you, and I think,
although I can't, I might have even been before this,
but I think it was when you, along with some others,
submitted some hoax articles to academic journals. It was a
(03:45):
number of years ago, and because your fake articles fit
their ideological mold, they published them. So which one was
your favorite fake article?
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Oh my gosh, that's so funny to ask, because it
really it depends on my mood. They're also funny. I mean,
there were a couple of them that were just stupid,
so not those, but it really depends on my mood.
I mean the most famous.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
How many of them did you get in? Seven?
Speaker 2 (04:13):
Seven were accepted for publication. Four of them actually got
published because there's a long delay. It's a time delay
between acceptance and publication. Sometimes it takes a year they
say yeah, we'll publish your article, and a year later
it comes out. So seven were accepted, four were published.
One of them, which is the infamous paper about dog
parks and activity at dog parks, was given an award
(04:36):
for Excellence in scholarship. Seven more were still under peer review.
We had a sociologist look at those. Well, we didn't
put them up to it. He did it on his
own and wrote an article right after it all came
out in twenty eighteen and said that he anticipated that
either eleven or twelve of the twenty we wrote would
have been accepted.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
Can you tell my listeners what the dog park article
was about?
Speaker 2 (04:57):
Well, you know, rape culture is a major problem woman's
society according to feminists, and that we apparently we live
in a rape culture. I've yet to find anybody who
endorses rape, but apparently that's the culture we live in.
And feminists are always interested in figuring out a how
we can id better identify that problem and be overcome it.
And so we wrote a paper saying that a great
(05:17):
way to identify human support for rape culture was to
go to the dog park and watch how humans reacted
to dogs humping each other at the dog park. And
so it was it male on male, male on female,
female on female, what kind of what was going on?
How did men and women, straight and gay respond to
seeing this? And we just made up a lot of
(05:40):
insane data that could not possibly be true. And for example,
that we watched dogs for one thousand hours in the
dog parks in Portland, Oregon, over the course of a
single year, but never in the rain. And it's like,
what that's honestly, that's four or five hours a day
for a work week, every single day for a year,
(06:02):
but never in the rain in Portland. And it's like,
this is just insane. And we claim that we have
observed ten thousand dogs. That's not how dog parks work.
It's like the same twenty dogs from the neighborhood come
in every day, and so it's just completely insane. But
we decided that you could determine, of course that straight
men were like when it was a male dog and
a female dog, it was like get them boy, you know,
(06:23):
they're all into it. So that's rape culture, right, and
everybody else was horrified, and so obviously there's a major problem.
And so we concluded that the way that we could
overcome rape culture is that well, dog training works to
moderate dog behavior. So if we were to take straight
men and train them the way that we trained dogs,
using obedience manuals and leashes and so on, then we
could overcome the similar problem in human environments like nightclubs.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
And they bought it. It's just, I mean, unbelievable.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
So you ask, which was like, that's so funny, Like
what am I supposed to do with this?
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Right?
Speaker 2 (06:57):
It's so preposterous. But there were other ones that are
I mean, they have extraordinarily some of them extraordinarily adult themes.
So it's like I can't really talk about them very easily,
but I can't even look at them without laughing. One
that doesn't that's also very funny is that on New
Year's Eve twenty seventeen, I started having some wine or
(07:18):
something or champagne, I don't know, in the afternoon, late
afternoon evening and sat down, and in six hours I
wrote this poetic inquiry. It's called where I wrote these
bogus poems. I actually had the Internet generate bad poetry generator,
and I just kind of modified them a little bit.
And I claimed that as it was an exploration of
feminist spirituality, But what I really did was pretended I
(07:38):
was a bitter divorced feminist who hates her ex husband
and wrote about these meetings I go to that are preposterous,
that celebrate the female genitalia, the female expression, and tap
into feminine spirituality as a way to cope with divorce
in how awful men are, And that got accepted in
a journal, very small journal. But it's ordinarily funny, and
(08:02):
I don't know how like it's just I don't know
how to pick a favorite, given how funny some of
them are. And the X rated ones honestly are the
funniest ones, but they're are we to talk about.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
So why do you think they bought it so completely?
Is it just like, you know, stupidity, because you seemed
on their side.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
Yes, yes, because we're on their side, that's it. They
don't actually what's happening, the crisis that we're seeing of
academics in the academy is not merely a plagiarism problem.
It's that the entire departments. It's not all departments, it's
not all academics, And there are other problems. The replication
crisis and the social sciences is its own problem. The
(08:39):
incentives are all wrong. That's its own problem. But in
these domains, which are best described as the theoretical humanities,
they don't know what they're doing. They don't know how
to authenticate whether research is good or not. There are
no benchmarks, they don't defer to data, they don't understand
or use rigorous methodologies, and so the only criteria that
(09:00):
they have to select papers is A does it reflect
well I already know in the literature. B does it
flatter my biases? And see is it well written? That's
all they have to decide, and we luckily have a
confession that that's sort of what was going on. One
of the papers we wrote was an exploration of masculinity
(09:21):
at Hooters restaurants, and so we wrote this completely asinine,
you know, story about how we went to Hooters after
our martial arts club every week, and I recorded for
our you know, every time we went to hooters the
whole time. We recorded it on a tape recorder and
I coded out how sexist and all this and the
(09:41):
reason men go to hooters, we concluded, was primarily to
order pun to give young women orders that they have
to follow out. And so it was like really, but
so it's all this dominance and all this, and it
was really like, you know, the waitress would come by
and I would say that we said, these really lude things,
and there was all these you know, crass you know,
(10:02):
appeals to masculinity, like how hot is a hot sauce
we can handle? And crude conversation and it was very dumb.
But we write this and then it ends up going
to the journal Men in Masculinities because we were studying
the masculinity. It turns out a feminist was one of
the peer reviewers, and she got very angry, even though
(10:22):
it was a masculinity's journal and a paper about the masculinity,
that we didn't write the paper focusing on the exploitation
of women in hooters, So first of all, it didn't
flatter her biases, so it got rejected from the Masculinities journal,
even though it was a masculiniti's paper, it didn't focus
on feminism. So then it turns around and gets sent
off to a journal called Sex Roles, which is sort
(10:42):
of interdisciplinary. It's actually very big, and the editor of
the journal actually kind of nonstandard practice left commentary, you know,
like the comments you can add on a Google dot
or a on a not Google but word document, left commentary,
and one of the comments at the very end was,
you know, on paraphrasing, but I'm pretty close to quoting
from memory. It's been five years, six years. And she said,
(11:05):
I've never been to one of these places, but I
always knew they were bad. I just didn't know they
were this bad. It's like, well, there you go. It's
all flattering biases.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
It's what you thought, it's what she thought was going
on there. She held, that's right, fuilled in the blanks.
We're going to take a quick break and be right
back on the Carol Marcowitch Show. So I feel like
I know what you're going to say to this. But
you know, a question I ask all of my guests
is what do you think is our largest cultural problem?
Speaker 2 (11:38):
We have a couple, don't we, uh, one or two?
I expect that you predict what I'm going to say
here correctly, which is that we are under the provocation
of an attempted cultural revolution, a communist cultural revolution. I
think that this provocation is mostly coming from inside the house.
In fact, I believe our intelligence communities are more involved
(11:59):
in it then foreign enemies. But we do have the
problem of foreign influence. There are I think both Russian
and Chinese operators working in that. We're now seeing with
what's going on campus that Qatar is one of the
major funders, so we know that there's the kind of
that Middle Eastern Arabic axis of you know, militant Islamists
(12:20):
that are also running influence campaigns. But I think that
the majority of the problem is actually coming from inside
the house. We see that with the FBI targeting parents
while letting cells of domestic terrorism go kind of unchecked.
So that's I think the biggest cultural problem we face
is that provocation and the psychological operations of propaganda operations
(12:42):
that are being fed to us through what we call
the corporate press or the fake news media. Because and
I do think that that's when you say the culture
the question was cultural problem, and I could point to
the miseducation of youth, and all of these are so
many factors, but the deranging effect of relentless rum beating
propaganda with a single voice right across the media is
(13:04):
causing the majority of the cultural problems that we're facing
in the United States, in my opinion, Do you have.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
Any optimism of it turning around? I mean, you've exposed
so much of it. Do you feel like it's gotten
better at all?
Speaker 2 (13:17):
I mean it's intensifying. I do think it's getting better,
and I'm actually relentlessly optimistic. Maybe I have faith. I
have no idea. I feel like I travel the country
and tell religious people that they don't have enough faith. Frankly,
the fact is, I actually am quite optimistic. I don't
think it's going to solve itself, and I don't think
it's going to resolve comfortably. I'm not saying that it's
(13:38):
going to resolve unpeaceably. I just think that we're going
to face more tribulation, if you will. Not to draw
a biblical word here, but you know, the joke here is.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
That James is very famously an atheist.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
I am very famous religious themes though.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
Well, I'm good, I'm good at the Bible apparently, is
what I'm learning. But yeah, so I think that I'm
not saying that I think that some kind of like
crazy war is going to erupt. I don't know that
that's the case. I don't suspect that that's the case.
As a matter of fact, I do think that we're
going to be visited with more discomforts. We had a
pandemic that was a discomfort. What its origins were are
(14:16):
a question. How it was handled is not a question.
It was intentionally mishandled, and we're almost completely clear on that.
They talk about ziz cyber attacks. So something huge, computer problems,
we see the rising tide of military activity, something uncomfortable
is going to happen. I'm quite certain between now and
(14:37):
the end, But I'm actually pretty optimistic because people are awake.
Not everybody's the biggest fan of Donald Trump. I'm sort
of a fan, But frankly, his greatest contribution of all
the things, so far as I'm aware to this day,
is still his phrase fake news. Identifying that there is
(14:57):
this propaganda operation, even if we can't quite free ourselves
from it as a as a society has been extraordinarily
beneficial in kind of stepping back from the ledge that
it wants to drive us over?
Speaker 1 (15:11):
Am I right that fake news was actually first used
to attack.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
Him, wasn't it? Like?
Speaker 1 (15:16):
Yeah, he just turned it around.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
It was Donald Trump verbal judo. He got told that
he was propagating fake news, and he was like, your
fake news, and it was stuck the other direction.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
You're rubber, I'm glue. But it works. I mean he's
able to do it well.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
The thing is is that what they were saying to
him was a crafted lie, and when he said it back,
it was true. So it stuck.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Yeah. Absolutely, So what would you be doing if you
weren't doing this? What would be a backup life plan?
Speaker 2 (15:52):
I mean, that's a really good question. There's a lot
of circumstances in terms of how that might shake out,
Like did I get canceled, in which case I'm probably
not gonna do anything for I don't know. I mean,
it's plausible that people would stop inviting me to speak
or do things or whatever, or that my primary income
base would fall out from under me or whatever. But
(16:13):
in that case, nothing for a while. Figure out my
bases before this, I was a massage therapist. I was
doing Yeah, I was, I was licensed I was doing
you know, anywhere anywhere between eight and fifteen massages a week,
primarily trying to cure chronic pain in my clientele. So
maybe I would be doing that.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
Still as interesting idea. That's amazing. What made you get
into that? Well?
Speaker 2 (16:39):
When I was in my early twenties, I used to
do a lot of fighting, like martial arts fight, but
I did like fights right for money and whatnot. And
I was training. I wasn't even in a fight. I
don't have this cool story. I was literally at the gym.
I was literally just doing a very basic like roll
back to your shoulders, roll up onto your butt, kind
of like rocking extra size to like strengthen abdominals as
(17:02):
a coordination if you end up on your back to
get back to your feet, you know, in different ways.
It's just a basic warm up exercise. It wasn't meant
to really achieve anything. There was nobody else involved, there
was no fighting. And I rolled back and I came
back forward and I was like, ah, my back and
my back went like completely dysfunctional. And it stayed that
way for a long time and I couldn't figure it out.
I didn't know how to fix it. Periodically it would
(17:24):
go out tremendous pain relegated to the floor for a
couple of weeks at a time, you know, just awful
and always stiff, always fragile, always hurt. And then in
my late twenties, I finally discovered this massage technique through
a friend who did it to me and then told
me to buy a book to train it myself. Learning
to do it to myself. It's called trigger point Therapy,
(17:46):
and the book was called the Trigger Point Therapy work Book.
This easy little book I bought for twenty dollars or whatever,
brought a couple of tools, tennis balls, this thing called
the therapne. I worked on myself for about six or
seven eight months, and I fixed my back. What had happened,
and unbeknownst to me, is that I had tight hip
flectures and when I rolled back, I triggered my hip
flextures to go into a spasm that basically never resolved.
(18:08):
And so when I finally was able to work out
the chronic tension and problems in my trigger points technically
in my iliosoas muscles, I fixed my back pain. I
had other issues that had come up kind of subsequent
to it that I had to work out, and it
took a lot of repetition to get it straightened out.
So when I finished my PhD, I was fed up
with academia. I didn't want to continue in academia. I
(18:31):
did not want to be in that machine. So I thought, well,
what can I do with my life? And I thought, well,
I have this technique. And my wife was a massage therapist,
so she was like, you're good at this. Why don't
you just get a license and do it and help
people out of their pain. There's a lot of people
in pain. And I thought, well, that's a good idea,
and so I did so.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
Interesting. Yeah, I mean, like, I what a way to
find something that you're good at is you know, to
fix it in yourself first. That's impressive. I didn't know
you were married either. I feel like you're pretty private
on social I.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
Try to be private about the whole family thing. Yes,
I am approaching what is it the second of May
that we're recording this. I met my wife on the
fourth of May two thousand and four, So I met
my wife twenty years ago. When this comes out.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
So do you feel like you've made it?
Speaker 2 (19:17):
Yes? Sort of? I mean so I had some weird metrics.
How do I know that I made it? Here are
two that have occurred to me because I don't know
I'm making it means, but there are certain signs. It's
like if I win the lottery, I won't tell anybody,
but there'll be signs that whole meme. Well, there are signs.
Here's a sign if I wear a T shirt that
has some graphics on it in public and somebody puts
(19:37):
a picture and I put it on social media, it
doesn't matter what the T shirt is. If I go
Google my name, within one hour, there will be one hundred,
like you know, junkie scammy T shirt site selling that
shirt wow available on So I'm somebody, You've made it.
Anything that I wear they go rip off. If it's
(19:58):
my own shirts, like my own design, they rip them off.
If it's somebody else's is that it's like they're a business,
they rip them off. But then the ultimate proof came
the other day and this is a little racye. I apologize,
but I guess you can handle it. I got sent
my brother in law sent me screenshots, so I haven't
seen this myself. When I went on Joe Rogan's podcast.
About a month ago, I wore a shirt set American Masculinity.
(20:22):
The phenomenon happened. It was all over the place. But
this is new. My brother in law sent me screenshots.
There is a company that sells mail enhancement pills that
has deep faked my presentation on Rogan into claiming that
these pills worked for me. And I figure, if my
image and AI version of my voice is now being
(20:44):
used to sell mail enhancement pills, I'm somebody. You really
have me fact, I must be very masculine or something.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Yeah, that's that's that's it. That's impressive. I really feel
like that's peak, you know, making it.
Speaker 2 (20:59):
That's about as good as it gets, right, I mean,
I get recognized. There are other little things. Virtually every
time I pass through a major airport, I have to
stop and say hi to somebody. And you know, I
just flew through the Denver Airport twice on a trip
that I took, and in both passages, I ran into
somebody that recognized me and wanted to talk to me.
(21:21):
So that happens virtually every time.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
Now, do you ever get like negative meetings or.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
It's always no, not in person they've all been positive. Yeah,
so far, at least in person. Maybe people that don't
like me do recognize me, but if they do, they
haven't said anything, which is fine, So no, not yet.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
Well I love that. I hope that continues. I also
don't get very Actually, I don't think I've ever had
a negative run in with a stranger. Anyway. I love
talking to end here with your best tip for my
listeners on how they can improve their lives.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
I'm gonna have to give a kind of a double
tip because there's sort of two parts to improving your life,
maybe three. Unfortunately, sorry, I got lots of advice. First
thing is first one. Just this wasn't the one I
was gonna say. This is the third one, but I'm
gonna say it first. What happens online is fake. It's
all fake. It's contour to be fake. It's not real relationships.
(22:24):
I mean, I'm glad that we've connected online and we're
having the show and we'll probably meet at some point
in person and we grow a friendship. That's fine. There
are good things that come out of online, but you
can't mistake online for reality. You're way, You're always going
to be way. Happier and better off the more of
actual reality and the less of digital reality. And I
mean this especially for younger people who are like looking
to date, Like get off the dating apps. Go meet
(22:45):
somebody in real life if you don't know where to
find them. Try going to church, something like that, a
join a club, something that's doing something. Get involved in
a political campaign. Trying to meet people in person. That's
a really big deal. Having that in person action. Dating
or not get together with people in person, it's a
really big deal.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
Touch grass.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
That's That's probably the biggest better life advice that I
could give. The other the two other pieces were if
you're not reading, you're probably not getting it. You need
to read. I know, I'm a boy. I don't like
to read. You need to read. But it's not enough
to just sit around and read. You've got to go
do something. It's sort of related to the get off
(23:25):
the internet. You have to get involved. Like everything that
I have had in success to where now that I'm
the digital deep fake face for mail enhancement pills has
come from the fact that I got myself out there
that I started just I didn't just sit home reading
about woke stuff. I started talking about it and started
doing something. I got involved, and there's different ways different
(23:48):
people get involved. I'm not going to tell you that
you need to do what I do, but you need
to be informed about what's going on and you need
to be doing something. Your life will improve. You will
have growth if you're getting out out there and doing
things and you have an informed basis from what you're
doing it. It will not if you stay at home
and stagnate. And so I guess those three pieces kind
(24:09):
of tie together because if you're just sitting there scrolling
social media and you're right in your time off, you're
not going anywhere, yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
And you're not doing anything despite the fact that you
feel like you're doing something. I enjoy the social.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
Med We have a whole show about that about oh,
how you think like you're a little lonely so, but
you're tired because it's been a long day, and you're
a little bit depressed because you're lonely. So you get
on social media and you're like, oh, I'm having social
interaction and then you put down your phone. It's not
very satisfying because you actually didn't interact with anybody in reality,
and probably somebody called you a name because of social media,
(24:43):
and like you feel worse and so there's like this
whole cycle of depression and anxiety that's connected to being us.
Oh we could talk for hours.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
Yes, well, touch grass, you know, go outside, meet people
in real life. I really like that advice. Thanks so
much for coming on, James. You are amazing. I always
enjoy reading your stuff. Thank you, James.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
Lindsay, thank you.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
Thanks so much for joining us on The Carol Marcowitz Show.
Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, and welcome back to the Carol Marcowitz Show on iHeartRadio.
When I book guests for this show, I tell them
it's a mostly non political podcast. I have said that
since the start that I want this to be a
podcast about life. I want to hear who people are
(00:27):
and what they do, what they believe. Sure, but I
never want it to be the news of the day
show where we cover the latest thing that Donald Trump
or Joe Biden said and what my guest thinks about that.
It's not that I have anything against those shows. They're
just exist already, and I didn't want to add to that.
(00:47):
That said, I am a political person in my everyday life.
I'm an open conservative, I'm a public person. I'm a
Twitter addict. I love the election, horse race, all of it.
So it's a challenge sometimes to keep all of that
off of this show. The main thing to me in
making this podcast was there are a million shows about
(01:12):
a million things where the host is liberal. They all
come from a liberal perspective and that doesn't get discussed whatsoever.
It's like being liberal is the default. They have publishing
houses that publish their books. For example, we have conservative
publishing houses. They have news sites. We have conservative news sites.
(01:34):
I didn't like any of that, and I want this
show to challenge that the show is going to come
with conservative assumptions, because again I'm conservative. I think marriage
is good, family is good, career success is good, and
nothing to apologize for all of it. In another time,
these wouldn't even be seen as conservative ideas, but now
(01:57):
they are, and they are what I I'm not going
to hit you over the head with my political angle,
but it's there, just like it is in every single
other show you listen to or watch. I say all
this only because my audience is growing very grateful for that,
and I want to be clear about what I'm trying
(02:18):
to do here. This is a podcast about purposeful living,
how to have a good life, how to meet cultural
challenges when you see them, how to be happier. I
love hearing what my listeners think, so if you have thoughts,
including potential future guests who you want to hear me interview,
let me know. Also, when i hit the one year
(02:40):
mark of this show in October, I'm going to switch
up my three standard questions, So if you have ideas
for what they should be, write to me. If you
have tips, for better living. Send them in let's improve
our lives together. The email is Carol Maarkowitz Show at
gmail dot com or tweet at me on X. Thank
you for listening. Coming up next and interview with James Lindsay.
(03:04):
Join us after the break. Welcome back to the Carol
Markowitz Show on iHeartRadio. My guest today is James Lindsay.
James is a leading expert on critical race theory, the
founder of New Discourse his website, and the author of
approximately ten books, his latest one being Queering of the
(03:24):
American Child. Hi James, Hey, Carol, so nice to have
you on. I have to say that I was trying
to remember when I first heard of you, and I think,
although I can't, I might have even been before this,
but I think it was when you, along with some others,
submitted some hoax articles to academic journals. It was a
(03:45):
number of years ago, and because your fake articles fit
their ideological mold, they published them. So which one was
your favorite fake article?
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Oh my gosh, that's so funny to ask, because it
really it depends on my mood. They're also funny. I mean,
there were a couple of them that were just stupid,
so not those, but it really depends on my mood.
I mean the most famous.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
How many of them did you get in? Seven?
Speaker 2 (04:13):
Seven were accepted for publication. Four of them actually got
published because there's a long delay. It's a time delay
between acceptance and publication. Sometimes it takes a year they
say yeah, we'll publish your article, and a year later
it comes out. So seven were accepted, four were published.
One of them, which is the infamous paper about dog
parks and activity at dog parks, was given an award
(04:36):
for Excellence in scholarship. Seven more were still under peer review.
We had a sociologist look at those. Well, we didn't
put them up to it. He did it on his
own and wrote an article right after it all came
out in twenty eighteen and said that he anticipated that
either eleven or twelve of the twenty we wrote would
have been accepted.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
Can you tell my listeners what the dog park article
was about?
Speaker 2 (04:57):
Well, you know, rape culture is a major problem woman's
society according to feminists, and that we apparently we live
in a rape culture. I've yet to find anybody who
endorses rape, but apparently that's the culture we live in.
And feminists are always interested in figuring out a how
we can id better identify that problem and be overcome it.
And so we wrote a paper saying that a great
(05:17):
way to identify human support for rape culture was to
go to the dog park and watch how humans reacted
to dogs humping each other at the dog park. And
so it was it male on male, male on female,
female on female, what kind of what was going on?
How did men and women, straight and gay respond to
seeing this? And we just made up a lot of
(05:40):
insane data that could not possibly be true. And for example,
that we watched dogs for one thousand hours in the
dog parks in Portland, Oregon, over the course of a
single year, but never in the rain. And it's like,
what that's honestly, that's four or five hours a day
for a work week, every single day for a year,
(06:02):
but never in the rain in Portland. And it's like,
this is just insane. And we claim that we have
observed ten thousand dogs. That's not how dog parks work.
It's like the same twenty dogs from the neighborhood come
in every day, and so it's just completely insane. But
we decided that you could determine, of course that straight
men were like when it was a male dog and
a female dog, it was like get them boy, you know,
(06:23):
they're all into it. So that's rape culture, right, and
everybody else was horrified, and so obviously there's a major problem.
And so we concluded that the way that we could
overcome rape culture is that well, dog training works to
moderate dog behavior. So if we were to take straight
men and train them the way that we trained dogs,
using obedience manuals and leashes and so on, then we
could overcome the similar problem in human environments like nightclubs.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
And they bought it. It's just, I mean, unbelievable.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
So you ask, which was like, that's so funny, Like
what am I supposed to do with this?
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Right?
Speaker 2 (06:57):
It's so preposterous. But there were other ones that are
I mean, they have extraordinarily some of them extraordinarily adult themes.
So it's like I can't really talk about them very easily,
but I can't even look at them without laughing. One
that doesn't that's also very funny is that on New
Year's Eve twenty seventeen, I started having some wine or
(07:18):
something or champagne, I don't know, in the afternoon, late
afternoon evening and sat down, and in six hours I
wrote this poetic inquiry. It's called where I wrote these
bogus poems. I actually had the Internet generate bad poetry generator,
and I just kind of modified them a little bit.
And I claimed that as it was an exploration of
feminist spirituality, But what I really did was pretended I
(07:38):
was a bitter divorced feminist who hates her ex husband
and wrote about these meetings I go to that are preposterous,
that celebrate the female genitalia, the female expression, and tap
into feminine spirituality as a way to cope with divorce
in how awful men are, And that got accepted in
a journal, very small journal. But it's ordinarily funny, and
(08:02):
I don't know how like it's just I don't know
how to pick a favorite, given how funny some of
them are. And the X rated ones honestly are the
funniest ones, but they're are we to talk about.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
So why do you think they bought it so completely?
Is it just like, you know, stupidity, because you seemed
on their side.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
Yes, yes, because we're on their side, that's it. They
don't actually what's happening, the crisis that we're seeing of
academics in the academy is not merely a plagiarism problem.
It's that the entire departments. It's not all departments, it's
not all academics, And there are other problems. The replication
crisis and the social sciences is its own problem. The
(08:39):
incentives are all wrong. That's its own problem. But in
these domains, which are best described as the theoretical humanities,
they don't know what they're doing. They don't know how
to authenticate whether research is good or not. There are
no benchmarks, they don't defer to data, they don't understand
or use rigorous methodologies, and so the only criteria that
(09:00):
they have to select papers is A does it reflect
well I already know in the literature. B does it
flatter my biases? And see is it well written? That's
all they have to decide, and we luckily have a
confession that that's sort of what was going on. One
of the papers we wrote was an exploration of masculinity
(09:21):
at Hooters restaurants, and so we wrote this completely asinine,
you know, story about how we went to Hooters after
our martial arts club every week, and I recorded for
our you know, every time we went to hooters the
whole time. We recorded it on a tape recorder and
I coded out how sexist and all this and the
(09:41):
reason men go to hooters, we concluded, was primarily to
order pun to give young women orders that they have
to follow out. And so it was like really, but
so it's all this dominance and all this, and it
was really like, you know, the waitress would come by
and I would say that we said, these really lude things,
and there was all these you know, crass you know,
(10:02):
appeals to masculinity, like how hot is a hot sauce
we can handle? And crude conversation and it was very dumb.
But we write this and then it ends up going
to the journal Men in Masculinities because we were studying
the masculinity. It turns out a feminist was one of
the peer reviewers, and she got very angry, even though
(10:22):
it was a masculinity's journal and a paper about the masculinity,
that we didn't write the paper focusing on the exploitation
of women in hooters, So first of all, it didn't
flatter her biases, so it got rejected from the Masculinities journal,
even though it was a masculiniti's paper, it didn't focus
on feminism. So then it turns around and gets sent
off to a journal called Sex Roles, which is sort
(10:42):
of interdisciplinary. It's actually very big, and the editor of
the journal actually kind of nonstandard practice left commentary, you know,
like the comments you can add on a Google dot
or a on a not Google but word document, left commentary,
and one of the comments at the very end was,
you know, on paraphrasing, but I'm pretty close to quoting
from memory. It's been five years, six years. And she said,
(11:05):
I've never been to one of these places, but I
always knew they were bad. I just didn't know they
were this bad. It's like, well, there you go. It's
all flattering biases.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
It's what you thought, it's what she thought was going
on there. She held, that's right, fuilled in the blanks.
We're going to take a quick break and be right
back on the Carol Marcowitch Show. So I feel like
I know what you're going to say to this. But
you know, a question I ask all of my guests
is what do you think is our largest cultural problem?
Speaker 2 (11:38):
We have a couple, don't we, uh, one or two?
I expect that you predict what I'm going to say
here correctly, which is that we are under the provocation
of an attempted cultural revolution, a communist cultural revolution. I
think that this provocation is mostly coming from inside the house.
In fact, I believe our intelligence communities are more involved
(11:59):
in it then foreign enemies. But we do have the
problem of foreign influence. There are I think both Russian
and Chinese operators working in that. We're now seeing with
what's going on campus that Qatar is one of the
major funders, so we know that there's the kind of
that Middle Eastern Arabic axis of you know, militant Islamists
(12:20):
that are also running influence campaigns. But I think that
the majority of the problem is actually coming from inside
the house. We see that with the FBI targeting parents
while letting cells of domestic terrorism go kind of unchecked.
So that's I think the biggest cultural problem we face
is that provocation and the psychological operations of propaganda operations
(12:42):
that are being fed to us through what we call
the corporate press or the fake news media. Because and
I do think that that's when you say the culture
the question was cultural problem, and I could point to
the miseducation of youth, and all of these are so
many factors, but the deranging effect of relentless rum beating
propaganda with a single voice right across the media is
(13:04):
causing the majority of the cultural problems that we're facing
in the United States, in my opinion, Do you have.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
Any optimism of it turning around? I mean, you've exposed
so much of it. Do you feel like it's gotten
better at all?
Speaker 2 (13:17):
I mean it's intensifying. I do think it's getting better,
and I'm actually relentlessly optimistic. Maybe I have faith. I
have no idea. I feel like I travel the country
and tell religious people that they don't have enough faith. Frankly,
the fact is, I actually am quite optimistic. I don't
think it's going to solve itself, and I don't think
it's going to resolve comfortably. I'm not saying that it's
(13:38):
going to resolve unpeaceably. I just think that we're going
to face more tribulation, if you will. Not to draw
a biblical word here, but you know, the joke here is.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
That James is very famously an atheist.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
I am very famous religious themes though.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
Well, I'm good, I'm good at the Bible apparently, is
what I'm learning. But yeah, so I think that I'm
not saying that I think that some kind of like
crazy war is going to erupt. I don't know that
that's the case. I don't suspect that that's the case.
As a matter of fact, I do think that we're
going to be visited with more discomforts. We had a
pandemic that was a discomfort. What its origins were are
(14:16):
a question. How it was handled is not a question.
It was intentionally mishandled, and we're almost completely clear on that.
They talk about ziz cyber attacks. So something huge, computer problems,
we see the rising tide of military activity, something uncomfortable
is going to happen. I'm quite certain between now and
(14:37):
the end, But I'm actually pretty optimistic because people are awake.
Not everybody's the biggest fan of Donald Trump. I'm sort
of a fan, But frankly, his greatest contribution of all
the things, so far as I'm aware to this day,
is still his phrase fake news. Identifying that there is
(14:57):
this propaganda operation, even if we can't quite free ourselves
from it as a as a society has been extraordinarily
beneficial in kind of stepping back from the ledge that
it wants to drive us over?
Speaker 1 (15:11):
Am I right that fake news was actually first used
to attack.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
Him, wasn't it? Like?
Speaker 1 (15:16):
Yeah, he just turned it around.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
It was Donald Trump verbal judo. He got told that
he was propagating fake news, and he was like, your
fake news, and it was stuck the other direction.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
You're rubber, I'm glue. But it works. I mean he's
able to do it well.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
The thing is is that what they were saying to
him was a crafted lie, and when he said it back,
it was true. So it stuck.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Yeah. Absolutely, So what would you be doing if you
weren't doing this? What would be a backup life plan?
Speaker 2 (15:52):
I mean, that's a really good question. There's a lot
of circumstances in terms of how that might shake out,
Like did I get canceled, in which case I'm probably
not gonna do anything for I don't know. I mean,
it's plausible that people would stop inviting me to speak
or do things or whatever, or that my primary income
base would fall out from under me or whatever. But
(16:13):
in that case, nothing for a while. Figure out my
bases before this, I was a massage therapist. I was
doing Yeah, I was, I was licensed I was doing
you know, anywhere anywhere between eight and fifteen massages a week,
primarily trying to cure chronic pain in my clientele. So
maybe I would be doing that.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
Still as interesting idea. That's amazing. What made you get
into that? Well?
Speaker 2 (16:39):
When I was in my early twenties, I used to
do a lot of fighting, like martial arts fight, but
I did like fights right for money and whatnot. And
I was training. I wasn't even in a fight. I
don't have this cool story. I was literally at the gym.
I was literally just doing a very basic like roll
back to your shoulders, roll up onto your butt, kind
of like rocking extra size to like strengthen abdominals as
(17:02):
a coordination if you end up on your back to
get back to your feet, you know, in different ways.
It's just a basic warm up exercise. It wasn't meant
to really achieve anything. There was nobody else involved, there
was no fighting. And I rolled back and I came
back forward and I was like, ah, my back and
my back went like completely dysfunctional. And it stayed that
way for a long time and I couldn't figure it out.
I didn't know how to fix it. Periodically it would
(17:24):
go out tremendous pain relegated to the floor for a
couple of weeks at a time, you know, just awful
and always stiff, always fragile, always hurt. And then in
my late twenties, I finally discovered this massage technique through
a friend who did it to me and then told
me to buy a book to train it myself. Learning
to do it to myself. It's called trigger point Therapy,
(17:46):
and the book was called the Trigger Point Therapy work Book.
This easy little book I bought for twenty dollars or whatever,
brought a couple of tools, tennis balls, this thing called
the therapne. I worked on myself for about six or
seven eight months, and I fixed my back. What had happened,
and unbeknownst to me, is that I had tight hip
flectures and when I rolled back, I triggered my hip
flextures to go into a spasm that basically never resolved.
(18:08):
And so when I finally was able to work out
the chronic tension and problems in my trigger points technically
in my iliosoas muscles, I fixed my back pain. I
had other issues that had come up kind of subsequent
to it that I had to work out, and it
took a lot of repetition to get it straightened out.
So when I finished my PhD, I was fed up
with academia. I didn't want to continue in academia. I
(18:31):
did not want to be in that machine. So I thought, well,
what can I do with my life? And I thought, well,
I have this technique. And my wife was a massage therapist,
so she was like, you're good at this. Why don't
you just get a license and do it and help
people out of their pain. There's a lot of people
in pain. And I thought, well, that's a good idea,
and so I did so.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
Interesting. Yeah, I mean, like, I what a way to
find something that you're good at is you know, to
fix it in yourself first. That's impressive. I didn't know
you were married either. I feel like you're pretty private
on social I.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
Try to be private about the whole family thing. Yes,
I am approaching what is it the second of May
that we're recording this. I met my wife on the
fourth of May two thousand and four, So I met
my wife twenty years ago. When this comes out.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
So do you feel like you've made it?
Speaker 2 (19:17):
Yes? Sort of? I mean so I had some weird metrics.
How do I know that I made it? Here are
two that have occurred to me because I don't know
I'm making it means, but there are certain signs. It's
like if I win the lottery, I won't tell anybody,
but there'll be signs that whole meme. Well, there are signs.
Here's a sign if I wear a T shirt that
has some graphics on it in public and somebody puts
(19:37):
a picture and I put it on social media, it
doesn't matter what the T shirt is. If I go
Google my name, within one hour, there will be one hundred,
like you know, junkie scammy T shirt site selling that
shirt wow available on So I'm somebody, You've made it.
Anything that I wear they go rip off. If it's
(19:58):
my own shirts, like my own design, they rip them off.
If it's somebody else's is that it's like they're a business,
they rip them off. But then the ultimate proof came
the other day and this is a little racye. I apologize,
but I guess you can handle it. I got sent
my brother in law sent me screenshots, so I haven't
seen this myself. When I went on Joe Rogan's podcast.
About a month ago, I wore a shirt set American Masculinity.
(20:22):
The phenomenon happened. It was all over the place. But
this is new. My brother in law sent me screenshots.
There is a company that sells mail enhancement pills that
has deep faked my presentation on Rogan into claiming that
these pills worked for me. And I figure, if my
image and AI version of my voice is now being
(20:44):
used to sell mail enhancement pills, I'm somebody. You really
have me fact, I must be very masculine or something.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Yeah, that's that's that's it. That's impressive. I really feel
like that's peak, you know, making it.
Speaker 2 (20:59):
That's about as good as it gets, right, I mean,
I get recognized. There are other little things. Virtually every
time I pass through a major airport, I have to
stop and say hi to somebody. And you know, I
just flew through the Denver Airport twice on a trip
that I took, and in both passages, I ran into
somebody that recognized me and wanted to talk to me.
(21:21):
So that happens virtually every time.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
Now, do you ever get like negative meetings or.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
It's always no, not in person they've all been positive. Yeah,
so far, at least in person. Maybe people that don't
like me do recognize me, but if they do, they
haven't said anything, which is fine, So no, not yet.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
Well I love that. I hope that continues. I also
don't get very Actually, I don't think I've ever had
a negative run in with a stranger. Anyway. I love
talking to end here with your best tip for my
listeners on how they can improve their lives.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
I'm gonna have to give a kind of a double
tip because there's sort of two parts to improving your life,
maybe three. Unfortunately, sorry, I got lots of advice. First
thing is first one. Just this wasn't the one I
was gonna say. This is the third one, but I'm
gonna say it first. What happens online is fake. It's
all fake. It's contour to be fake. It's not real relationships.
(22:24):
I mean, I'm glad that we've connected online and we're
having the show and we'll probably meet at some point
in person and we grow a friendship. That's fine. There
are good things that come out of online, but you
can't mistake online for reality. You're way, You're always going
to be way. Happier and better off the more of
actual reality and the less of digital reality. And I
mean this especially for younger people who are like looking
to date, Like get off the dating apps. Go meet
(22:45):
somebody in real life if you don't know where to
find them. Try going to church, something like that, a
join a club, something that's doing something. Get involved in
a political campaign. Trying to meet people in person. That's
a really big deal. Having that in person action. Dating
or not get together with people in person, it's a
really big deal.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
Touch grass.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
That's That's probably the biggest better life advice that I
could give. The other the two other pieces were if
you're not reading, you're probably not getting it. You need
to read. I know, I'm a boy. I don't like
to read. You need to read. But it's not enough
to just sit around and read. You've got to go
do something. It's sort of related to the get off
(23:25):
the internet. You have to get involved. Like everything that
I have had in success to where now that I'm
the digital deep fake face for mail enhancement pills has
come from the fact that I got myself out there
that I started just I didn't just sit home reading
about woke stuff. I started talking about it and started
doing something. I got involved, and there's different ways different
(23:48):
people get involved. I'm not going to tell you that
you need to do what I do, but you need
to be informed about what's going on and you need
to be doing something. Your life will improve. You will
have growth if you're getting out out there and doing
things and you have an informed basis from what you're
doing it. It will not if you stay at home
and stagnate. And so I guess those three pieces kind
(24:09):
of tie together because if you're just sitting there scrolling
social media and you're right in your time off, you're
not going anywhere, yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
And you're not doing anything despite the fact that you
feel like you're doing something. I enjoy the social.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
Med We have a whole show about that about oh,
how you think like you're a little lonely so, but
you're tired because it's been a long day, and you're
a little bit depressed because you're lonely. So you get
on social media and you're like, oh, I'm having social
interaction and then you put down your phone. It's not
very satisfying because you actually didn't interact with anybody in reality,
and probably somebody called you a name because of social media,
(24:43):
and like you feel worse and so there's like this
whole cycle of depression and anxiety that's connected to being us.
Oh we could talk for hours.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
Yes, well, touch grass, you know, go outside, meet people
in real life. I really like that advice. Thanks so
much for coming on, James. You are amazing. I always
enjoy reading your stuff. Thank you, James.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
Lindsay, thank you.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
Thanks so much for joining us on The Carol Marcowitz Show.
Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Karol Markowicz
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